David Gest announces intent to donate unreleased album from Michael

Michael Jackson's Robert Burns songs to be releasedSinger's collection of showtunes inspired by Burns's poetry could be donated to a Scottish museum by David Gest

reddit this Comments (22) Sean Michaels guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 January 2012 06.08 EST Article history Burns unit … Michael Jackson's album inspired by the Scottish poet could be releasedA Scottish museum may soon be home to one of Michael Jackson's unreleased albums. More than a decade after Jackson and David Gest recorded songs based on the poetry of Robert Burns, Gest reportedly intends to donate the recordings to the poet's official museum in Ayrshire.

In a career of peculiar projects, it remains one of the singer's strangest: a collection of showtunes inspired by Burns's life and work. The songs have never been made public – it was either overlooked or forgotten in the Jackson estate's search for unreleased material.

Now, after a visit to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Gest has reportedly agreed to donate Jackson's most Scottish songs. "[David] offered to look them out and provide copies [for us]," museum director Nat Edwards told the List. The museum hopes to "produce some sort of CD", as a fundraiser. "[It would] be a way of getting audiences interested in Burns and illustrating his international, enduring artistic legacy," Edwards said.

Gest explained in a recent TV documentary for BBC Alba that he and Jackson were Burns fanatics. "I said to Michael, let's do a play [based on] Burns's life and he said he would help me with the music." Jackson ended up hiring musicians and borrowing the studio at the Jackson family home in Encino, California. "Michael believed in the project so much," Gest said. "We took about eight or 10 of Burns's poems and put them to contemporary music, such as A Red Red Rose, Ae Fond Kiss and the story of Tam O'Shanter."

Although the collaboration was first revealed in 2008, it seems to have taken place in the late 80s. They originally intended to stage a musical, Gest said, produced by actor Anthony Perkins and directed by Gene Kelly. Plans were scuppered after Perkins's death in 1992. Kelly died in 1996. That year, Gest premiered a play based on Burns's life, Red Red Rose.

Michael Jackson’s career is taking yet another inexplicable turn as news of his most recent project hits the public. According to friend and contributor David Gest, Jackson spent the last year recording an album, using the poetry of Scottish national bard Robert Burns as lyrics.

Gest, who was once married to Liza Minnelli, told the Daily Record, “Our favourite poet in the world is Robbie Burns. Michael and I were originally going to do a musical on his life with Gene Kelly directing and Anthony Perkins as executive producer—but they both died.”

Poems that made it into the collection include “Ae Fond Kiss” and “Tam O’Shanter.” Gest apparently did a Burns-themed tour of Scotland during the research process, where he cited the highlight of his trip: "I felt like I was a little kid looking for all those things Burns wrote about and the curator let me lay on the bed Burns slept in at his family home. The alarm went off. It was really surreal because Michael and I think of him as one of the most brilliant minds ever."

David Baird, president of the Southern Scottish Counties Burns Association reported that he was “incredulous” at this news. He’s happy that an artist is bringing Burns’ work to a modern audience, but fears that the attempt will make the venerated cultural icon “look silly.”

"The idea of turning Burns's tunes and songs, which he carefully collected, into 'show tunes' just kind of grates a wee bit," he told the BBC.

Burns has been a popular topic in UK news recently, as Scottish nationalists and academics were outraged when Newsnight journalist Jeremy Paxman dismissed the poet as “no more than a king of sentimental doggerel” in his introduction to the new edition of Chambers Dictionary.

Robert Burns lived in the late eighteenth century and is most familiar to the American audience because he penned the New Years’ anthem "Auld Lang Syne," our version of which is, of course, translated. Burns originally wrote in Scots, defined by the Scottish Language Centre as the “traditional Germanic language of Lowland Scotland and the Northern Isles.”

We can ponder the translation dilemma, together with the prospect of Michael Jackson trying to replicate Scots pronunciation in song, while enjoying what is reportedly his next undertaking: the celebrated Highlands tune “A Red, Red Rose.”